Skillful art forgeries have value of their own

David Bonetti, EXAMINER ART CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Friday, August 13, 1999

THE FIRST paying job I had in the arts was for a private dealer in Boston, for whom I served as secretary, registrar and general factotum. One of the first projects I worked on was registering an eclectic collection inherited by a young couple who had moved to Boston's Back Bay from Seattle while he attended Harvard Business School. Yuppies before the fact, they insisted that they wanted to sell the old stuff and put the proceeds into artists of their own generation. (In fact, they probably wanted to buy a chalet in Aspen.)

Anyway, the collection was a nightmare. Third-rate Spanish Golden Age paintings, dusty American landscapes, modern drawings and paintings, all accompanied by little yellowing identifying tags cut from the catalogs of auctions at which they had been purchased.

One day I had a portfolio of drawings spread out on the dining room table. I was dutifully recording the information on the registration forms when my employer shuffled the drawings with disgust, saying the chilling word, "Fakes!"

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As I looked at them critically, I saw what he saw - four drawings by Picasso, Kokoschka, Chagall, Dali, all requisite mid-century names - had been done by the same hand. Not only that, they had been done on the same paper, as if the four artists had shared a tablet, and with the same black ink. On stylistic grounds, only the Kokoschka might have had a chance to pass. Yet, during the 1950s, all four drawings were sold by a reputable auction house to a serious collector.

When it comes to old art, caveat emptor should be the buyers' mantra.

It turned out that nearly half the collection was composed of forgeries. Basically, only the American landscapes were real - at that time, they were so undervalued that nobody would bother forging them. But the sale prices of the good pieces were so high that the couple was pleased. We even sold a "wrong" Kokoschka painting of a London riverscape - with "forgery" stamped on the back in red - to the collectors who had originally wanted to buy it. They got it for $5,000 instead of the $125,000 they had been willing to pay. They loved the painting no matter who made it, and they considered that they had gotten a bargain.

Over the centuries, the idea of forgeries, fakes, copies being passed on the art market has fascinated even those who have no interest in the real thing. Why? We love to see a fool and his money parted as much as we love to see experts exposed as incompetents if not frauds.

And if you think that passing forgeries is a modern sport, then consider Jean Le Malchanceux's remark, "If fools did not go to market, cracked pots and false wares would not be sold." He made it in the 12th century.

The mot by the hitherto unknown-to-me Malchanceux appears as the epigram to Clifford Irving's classic 1969 investigation of modern forgery, "Fake!" It is the story of Elmyr de Hory, "the greatest art forger of our time," as he is generally called. (Irving went on to create a hoax of his own by passing off a work of fiction as the autobiography of Howard Hughes.)

Of course, the greatest art forger of our time would be the one whose handicraft has passed undetected on the walls of prominent collectors and museums. De Hory's fakes, for all the mimetic skill they possess, were eventually discovered for what they were.

At this point the myth, told not only by Irving but by Orson Welles in his 1974 film "F For Fake," seems stronger than the reality. De Hory (1911-1976), a poseur who traveled in aristocratic circles in Europe and among American nouveau riches in California and Texas, was a failed painter capable of turning out pastiches of modern masters that fooled the eyes of the best dealers, curators and collectors of the postwar period. But today, only a sucker would fall for any of the dozen works on display at TERRAIN as that elusive real thing.

Of course, we enter the gallery already knowing that these paintings and drawings are all de Hory fakes. How would we judge them if they were on the wall at SFMOMA or the Legion of Honor beside the mediocre modern paintings that normally hang there? Certainly some of the paintings sold to gullible San Franciscans in the '50s are questionable.

The line between the authentic and the phony is always thin and permeable in the arts. Many artists making their own work are often fakes to begin with. (I could make a surprisingly lengthy list.) The story of Picasso saying,

"See, even Picasso is capable of faking Picasso," when he had been reminded by someone who witnessed him making a work after he had rejected it as a fake is retold in the Welles film.

Among the de Horys at TERRAIN, some are more convincing than others. His Monet landscape is sensitively rendered and could possibly pass as easily today as it might have in his '60s heyday. The cheery Dufy "Wheat Field" and fanciful Chagall "Fruit on a Donkey" would pass by me - but what does it matter whether a work by such artists is authentic or not? Both of them were guilty through the second halves of their careers of plagiarizing themselves. Why shouldn't de Hory have been able to cash in on their scam?

And then there is the Modigliani pastiche, "La Dame Triste." De Hory was something of a Modigliani specialist, and he made hundreds of drawings by the classic artist maudit that were eagerly accepted by the experts of the time. Superficially, this painting of a sad-eyed lady looks like the real thing, but if you look more closely, you have immediate doubts. Would Modigliani have painted such flaccid arms? Or such a flat, unarticulated, lifeless bosom? Who can say? Even the best artists have their off days. In any case, the $20,000 asked for the de Hory Modigliani is nothing compared to the millions a real one would go for on today's market.

When you get to more serious work, de Hory's ability to convince declines steeply. His attempt at a cubist painting by Picasso is embarrassing. De Hory quite clearly doesn't understand cubism, a style equally conceptual and perceptual, and his stab at it is a dismal failure.

Still, the de Hory show is instructive and entertaining. We can laugh at the gullibility of a past generation as we test our own sense of connoisseurship. Can any of us be certain that we wouldn't have fallen for such skilled deception if it had been offered us?&lt;